Bizman aboard missing Titanic sub was part of India's cheetah project

Shubhadeep Choudhury

New Delhi, June 20

Billionaire British adventurer Hamish Harding, who is among the five persons aboard the missing tourist submarine touring the wreckage of RMS Titanic in the North Atlantic, owned aviation company Action Aviation that supplied the customised Boeing 747-400 aircraft for transporting eight cheetahs from Namibia to India in September 2022.

PM Narendra Modi, in a bid to reintroduce the felines to the Indian wild, had released the cheetahs into the Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh on September 17.

Harding recently posted on social media that a ship had set sail from St John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, en route to the Titanic wreck. Harding and the rest of the crew were scheduled to begin diving operations presumably to explore over the century-old wreckage of the ill-fated Titanic. In an old video shared on his Facebook page in September, Harding could be heard speaking about the transfer of the cheetahs from Namibia to India.

“We are here in Windhoek, Namibia. We have arrived in Boeing 747 from the UAE and are all ready for the cheetahs to load in the next 48 hours. We are practising now to make sure the cheetahs’ boxes get on board through the doors. Everything is on track for the reintroduction of cheetahs into India for the first time in more than 75 years,” Harding said in the video.